The latest ecommerce news in marketing, measurement and Shopify. (October 5, 2026)
Shopify launches Canvas for online store design
Shopify’s Canvas, announced on October 1, 2026, is a new visual design workspace where merchants build their online stores with Sidekick, Shopify’s AI agent. It lays out every page of a store side by side so you can pan across the whole thing, zoom into details, and either click elements to edit them or ask Sidekick in chat, with changes appearing live on a real, interactive render of the store’s code. Sidekick now works directly on theme files, checks its own code and screenshots before handing work back, and can handle anything from tweaking a single section to redesigning the entire store. The pitch is that a fully custom store no longer needs coding skills or a developer. However, Shopify admits that it’s still early days, Canvas isn’t replacing the existing editor yet and there are still gaps to close. It’s rolling out to merchants over the coming days.
Google Gemini adds UTM parameters for referral attribution
Google has quietly started adding UTM parameters to outbound links in Gemini, so site owners can finally attribute that traffic properly instead of watching it land in GA4’s “direct” bucket. A referrer already existed, but a Redditor who spotted the change pointed out it mostly only survives on desktop. The Gemini mobile app reportedly passes it through only about 9% of the time and Android assistant invocations strip it completely, whereas a UTM survives in-app webviews and shows up in server logs.
Google’s John Mueller said he could see the tags too and offered to pass referrer issues to the team. For SEOs, it means real numbers for comparing Gemini against other AI referrers and traditional search, and for justifying spend on AI channels. The catch is that it’s undocumented, so it’s unclear when the tags fire (ChatGPT, for comparison, only tags links in answers grounded in web sources).
Meta turns creator livestreams into paid ads
Meta has brought Live Video Ads to Instagram, letting brands put paid spend behind a creator’s livestream while it’s happening, a format that already existed on Facebook. It works alongside Partnership Ads, so a stream can reach beyond the creator’s own followers, and it gives creators a new way to charge more in brand deals since the live broadcast itself becomes an asset brands pay to amplify. Meta announced it at the IAB’s first Global Creator Week alongside the global launch of its Creator Marketing Hub, which merges Creator Marketplace and the Partnership Ads Hub and adds tools like affiliate content filters, expiring content permissions, one-click ad creation, in-Hub messaging, and editing that strips copyrighted music so posts qualify as ads. Partnership Ads are also coming to the Meta Ads MCP connector, so advertisers can run creator campaigns through an AI agent. The backdrop: Meta’s figures put creator content at 20% lower cost per acquisition and 50% higher click-through rates than standard brand creative.
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